A hardware architecture for surface splatting
Tim Weyrich, Simon Heinzle, Timo Aila, Daniel Fasnacht, Stephan Oetiker, Mario Botsch, Cyril Flaig, Simon Mall, Kaspar Rohrer, Norbert Felber, Hubert Kaeslin, Markus H. Groß · ACM Transactions on Graphics · 2007
We present a novel architecture for hardware-accelerated rendering of point primitives. Our pipeline implements a refined version of EWA splatting, a high quality method for antialiased rendering of point sampled representations. A central feature of our design is the seamless integration of the architecture into conventional, OpenGL-like graphics pipelines so as to complement triangle-based rendering. The specific properties of the EWA algorithm required a variety of novel design concepts including a ternary depth test and using an on-chip pipelined heap data structure for making the memory accesses of splat primitives more coherent. In addition, we developed a computationally stable evaluation scheme for perspectively corrected splats. We implemented our architecture both on reconfigurable FPGA boards and as an ASIC prototype, and we integrated it into an OpenGL-like software implementation. Our evaluation comprises a detailed performance analysis using scenes of varying complexity.